I have a CD player in my car that plays MP3-CDRs. I’d like to burn a few of the songs I’ve purchased from the iTunes Music Store in MP3 format to a CD-ROM. Can’t do that, of course. I could burn an audio CD, rip it to MP3 files, then burn the files, but that’s a lot of steps and wasted CDs.

I know there are CD-ROM emulators out there (which trick programs into thinking that an image file mounted from the hard drive is a real CD-ROM drive), but can one of these fake a CDR drive and fool a program into thinking it’s “burning” data to the disc (when really it’s writing into the image file)? Will that work for burning music in standard Audio CD format? That could be a good solution. Burn to and rip from a file. Still a lot of steps, but at least no physical disc is wasted. I guess that’s my main hang-up — CDR media is cheap, but on principle it’s stupid to have to waste physical discs because of an artificially imposed block on rights I should have by virtue of having purchased something. I abhor artificial barriers like this. Granted, I know what I’m getting into by purchasing music from iTMS, but the absence of an as-convenient alternate choice means that to _not_ conveniently purchase music online because of the aforementioned artificially imposed barrier is to succumb to it, and I’m all about not doing that, on principle.